Dual power in the factories ended through isolation, not armed force

Evidence

The April strike was provoked by the employers. Their objective was explicitly the ending of “dual power” in the factories, i.e. the destruction or emasculation of the commissioni interne . That they succeeded, despite a month’s strike by the metalworkers, ten days of general strike throughout Turin and the province of Piedmont, and the organisation of an urban Soviet defended by armed workers, was due not to the huge armed force which was concentrated in the city — “an army of police … cannon and machineguns at all strategic points” as Gramsci described it — but to the failure of the Turin comrades to secure the support of the party or trade unions nationally, and to draw in workers outside Piedmont. Their failure to organise earlier on a national scale now caught up with them, and Turin stood alone. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 98

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: The concept of ‘dual power’ and the defeat of a localized radical movement through national isolation connects forward to how racialized groups face exclusion when their struggle remains uncoordinated nationally — a structural parallel to the Islamophobia field’s interest in how minority movements fail without broad alliances.

Related

• Turin’s strikes convinced Gramsci workers could ally with southern peasants (similarity 0.81)
• An unresolved party-versus-union divide left the Italian radical movement internally dual (similarity 0.81)
• Turin’s militant proletariat proved a natural class ally for Southern peasants (similarity 0.78)